


Luminous Gravestones and How She's Not a Hero

by Celestiallie



Category: Homestuck
Genre: But they're mostly implied, F/M, Multi, Other, There's also a shitton of other ships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-01-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celestiallie/pseuds/Celestiallie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a huge difference between how it was supposed to happen, and how it actually happened. Jade Harley can only trace the stars that serve as memorials enough for one (but not thirty two) with her fingers, and think, only think - because her purpose means nothing beyond mere existence.</p>
<p>Theoretical Endgame where Jade Harley is the only survivor of the New Universe, as she serves the purpose of the Genesis Frog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Luminous Gravestones and How She's Not a Hero

Here’s how it was supposed to happen:

All 32 of (humans, trolls, heroes) them would overcome adversity, create a new universe, become ultimate gods, until another universe was destined to be made, and they would flitter off, one by one, slowly, steadily, but together, forever. They would compose their own symphony of happy endings, paint their own picture of happily ever after. Nothing can’t be overcome if they had their instruments tuned and refined to play the perfect key – all of them harmonising at once to sing their gleeful tune, if they were all prepared with their paintbrushes dripping with paint, every single one of them a completely different colour to bring to life their happy ending, in wondrous, glorious detail. Anything other than a complete Nirvana, an unquestionable happy close to the book they had all written, each page in a different scrawl, was simply unfathomable. They were all determined to make their own happy ending, and all that was needed was a team effort to make it a reality. They were all heroes in their own respect, they were all beings to be admired, marked by adversity yet decorated in glory.  
The happy ending was for those who tried, and everyone wanted their own happy ending, in some respect.

Here’s how it actually happened:

All the instruments, tuned for only one player each, and brushed smeared with a colour for one, had been left to Jade to synchronise and harmonise a happy ending for only one. The songs she would play sounded horrendous, the pictures she painted gloomy and dark, and none of whatever she could do spelt happily ever after.

A God she was, but a Hero she was not.

\---

Jade Harley counts the luminous stars she sticks on the ceiling, one, two, skip a few, thirty one and no thirty two. She does the thinking for thirty two, asking questions that she knows will never be answered.

Question the first; why did she survive?

She satisfies herself by thinking of space, spread sporadically in between the incandescent stars, surrounding her at all angles and composing of her very being. Then Jade asks herself;

“What is Space?”

because she is space, and she finds that she is nothing but empty, useless space; a terribly made filler for a true hero. After she searches, she finds that Space is eternal; where her fingers stretch miles and miles lie, when she moves what feels like a millimetre, kilometres and beyond are shifted. The winds change, light fades, time is fleeting yet space is eternal, infinite, all the words she can use for an aching emptiness that she doesn’t understand completely but hates all the same. So Space must survive all the same, for without space, then there is no symphony or painting to show.

Jade is not a hero. Jade had killed her friends, some unconsciously when not in her own mind, but all of them consciously. She is responsible for every single one of their deaths, after she decided to be the vessel of these songs and artworks that would never be heard, never drawn. That isn’t a hero’s path. She destroyed them all when she could have chosen not to. Their deaths are on her hands, and she thinks that maybe this loneliness is a sort of penance for her choices and actions. She then thinks that it’s still not complete penance, because she replaces her friends with stars of her element, and it’s not complete loneliness, because she revels in the slight comfort (ever so slight) that these unfulfilling replacements give her.

She doesn’t deserve survival, but only true heroes can rest in peace. Not live with a disturbance of burdens weighing down constantly.

If she were to be a realist – and she is, or, at least, has become – then she would say that the reason for her (in particular, for there were two more vessels of space) survival would have been because she had originated from the seed of a universe, the one that paved the way to this universe that is filled with things to explore but where her will is lost for doing so. Another reason she has also suggested (because there is no one else to answer her questions anymore) is a mere practicality. There were no more suitable frogs to become the universe, and as the time drip, dropped, died, it chose the second most suitable successor.

Jade prefers the first explanation, because as much of a realist as she is, she does not believe in such simple reasons for her survival, does not believe that any one of her friends could have filled this role, because she deserves it most of all. (The term ‘Witch’ was used as one of reverence in the Game, to describe a Hero, but she finds it ironic now, because she is a truly Wicked Witch and deserving of that title)

Question the second; where are they all?

Jade would like to say that the slowly fading incandescent stars are where her friends are, but she assumes that they were swallowed up by oblivion. She dreams in monochromes and sleeplessness, everchanging and everfading lights and darks. Only lights and darks. She doesn’t dream of colours, or shapes or bubbles. All her sleepiness brings her is an inconstant show of lights and darks, and she doesn’t sleep anymore. She doesn’t need to rest, because she doesn’t do anything except for mere existence, which alone, some would believe, is a rest in itself. Mere existence and watching over luminous memorials, the only pitiful method she has of remembering her friends, because not even narcolepsy can bring her colourful visages. She is glad that she has gotten rid of that awful habit.

Jade would like to be poetic, and say that her friends are always with her, in the rush of the wind that plays with her hair, in the light that constantly changes positions on her face (and very much almost leads her to believe in its movement), and even in the mere passing of time itself. But Jade has never been much of a poet with her words, and it brings pain sometimes to know that she can’t even articulate in words where she wishes her friends would be. She wishes that they would be playing their own symphonies and painting their own pictures of happy endings somewhere else, but she already asserts that they are in oblivion. Which, she sometimes tricks herself into believing, is better than existence, if existence marks a sorrowful being such as herself.

Jade is not a dreamer, not since she stopped dreaming, sleeping (crying, feeling). She doesn’t want to be a dreamer, and dream up her own happy endings for them, because she’s long since learned that the greatest of expectations create the fastest path to ruin. She doesn’t spin happy endings to soothe herself, because that is selfish, and she has to atone for her selfish existence. The only (selfish) thought she allows to comfort herself is the notion that they are at least free, spread haphazardly across a ceiling, but still free. She moves them around every so often, just to remind herself that they are free, unlike the thirty second star, which she keeps in the drawer next to her bed, because it does not glow. It is a defect, and therefore, she decides, cannot be allowed free – it is not in place with the rest, it never will be, it is too different, and marked with its flaws. The thought of freedom is exhilarating, because at the very least oblivion freed her friends, and they won’t ever have to suffer the strange loneliness that is not quite loneliness Jade lives every day.

(She tells herself that she is selfish before she can go too far with her undeserved happiness. It’s something that she has to remind herself, which just proves how selfish she is.)

Question the third; what is her purpose?

Even with eons of thinking, and eons more to come, Jade still hasn’t answered this question. She could be optimistic and say that her purpose is to let her friends live; through her memories, through her shabby memorials that grow dimmer every day (just like her memories, which makes her existence rather redundant). However, one of the things she finds joy in is tracing the stars on the ceiling with her fingers, and, for some odd reason, she thinks it might just be purpose enough for her (which is, frankly, ridiculous, but strangely numbing). Tracing the stars with her fingers, reorganising them every day, and memorising the feel of them, giving them names, rudimentary personalities, talking to them – memorials that will never do the justice that for thirty one but enough for one. This, Jade thinks, feels like a purpose, because it seemed dishonourable to simply take her friends’ lives without a purpose behind it. Even if it is such a shallow and feeble purpose, she finds pride for thirty two in having one.

Today, she decides, John and Dave would be watching movies together (she reminds herself that it’s not selfish to play out their lives when she took them, and these stars are only representations, memorials for real people). She places the two stars (one that is gritty on one side and smooth on the other, another whose – always whose, not ‘its’ or ‘that’s’ – all wonky and whimsical) together, cocking towards each other as though in a play fight. Dirk and Jake could join them, and she places another two (one that is all points, another that is all curves) alongside the others. Terezi and Vriska could be having an argument, Nepeta and Equuis playing together, Latula and Mituna on a lovely date together, Eridan and Feferi just in the ocean, Aradia and Sollux having a true heart-to-heart, Jane and Roxy trying to make cakes… She puts them all into their appropriate friend groups, and decides that this is a very realistic theoretical day. 

She keeps one – one that she calls Karkat, except it is only a representation of him, a memorial for what he actually is (was) – on her chest, clasped between her hands. Jade thinks (she’s thought for thirty two, she decides she is good at thinking) that she and Karkat would be together on this particular theoretical day, as they have been, for every single one of these theoretical days. They’re small lights of comfort, but she can make out Rose’s smile and Kanaya’s awkward laugh by the way she’s put them together, the affectionate hissing and growling between Terezi and Vriska, and Karkat (just Karkat) by the way she can feel the bumps and grinds between her fingers. 

Even if these are small comforts, she is fully aware that her true purpose is to be space, to house this universe, not to play pretend with luminous memorials and indulge in delusions that every day is one of her theoretical days. Jade will be there for a long time, she knows, as the only thing that takes root in her bones and winds its way around her whole body is an emotion that (she finally thinks, a final answer to the fourth, unasked and therefore unanswered question of the indescribable emotion) combines guilt and loneliness to equate to her existence. She is undiseased. But someday, she knows, someday meteors would wreak throughout her body, and a number (she does not know, for her purpose is not to know) of successors may be appointed as she is ripped apart into quantum shreds (because even though her purpose is not to know, she still knows). She’s not a hero, even then, but she can pretend.

Maybe then she can stick the thirty second star where it belongs.

Because it is then (and only then) that she will be freed to the clutches of an infinite oblivion of harmonic symphonies and paintings that will never end (she thinks – only for one, because thirty one don’t exist - that this sort of happy ending, the truly ideal one, is not one that can be finished, but can be continued forever.)

**Author's Note:**

> Ahhh~ I really want to say that, no matter how messily this fic is written and how badly it's read, I just want all the readers of this fic to know that this is one of the things that's helping me get out of the worst art block I've had in history. I hope you enjoy it, even though it probably sounds like fitfuls of strange emotions and nothing like Jade. The AU is just something I've been thinking about for the ending of Homestuck, but it's nothing but theory after all (for now.)
> 
> Once again, hope you enjoyed it! It's really been personally helping, especially putting my creative energies in somewhere.
> 
> All kudos, bookmarks and comments are appreciated!
> 
> ~Celestiallie


End file.
